An attacker with physical access to volatile memory, may try to access data in the volatile memory. Optionally the data in the volatile memory may include encryption keys and/or other sensitive data.
The attacker may use any appropriate technique to access the data in the volatile memory. One such technique is laser scanning in which an integrated circuit with volatile memory may be scanned with a laser beam. The laser illumination stimulus may increase current passing through a scanned device. When a memory cell is scanned with a laser, current changes may depend on the stored bit content (either logical “0” or “1”). The current signal may therefore be measured to determine the memory cell's content.